


Ellipsis, or Sherlock in Love

by aderyn



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: ASiB, Post-Reichenbach, TGG, TRF, departures & returns, language fail, minding the gaps, pronoun instability, things that don't happen, what we believe, what we do, what we don't say
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-18
Updated: 2012-05-18
Packaged: 2017-11-05 14:31:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/407517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What would it be like if you *were*, not as people think you are (virgin and confirmed bachelor) but as you *are*, if you were, if you were to say you believed in it?</p>
<p>“This is written like a *love story*,” John says, reading the latest about them in the Sun.</p>
<p>It’s difficult, believing in the unseen.</p>
<p>But sooner or later, one of them is going to say it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ellipsis, or Sherlock in Love

**Author's Note:**

> Title and inspiration from D.H. Lawrence (see endnotes)
> 
> With many thanks to [greenjudy](http://archiveofourown.org/users/greenjudy/pseuds/greenjudy) (for motivation and wrangling) and [whitefang3927](http://archiveofourown.org/users/whitefang3927/pseuds/whitefang3927) (for inspirational conversation).
> 
> And to [ Moranion](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Moranion/pseuds/Moranion) and Chapbook, always!

_“I believe in the unseen hosts.”—D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love_

 

What would it be like if you _were,_ not as people think you are (virgin and confirmed bachelor) but as you _are_ , if you were, if you were to say you believed in it?

“This is written like a _love story_ ,” John says, a bit incredulous, reading the latest about them in the _Sun_.

“It’s the most vicious of motivators,” says Sherlock, with faint irony.  It’s a dangerous disadvantage. It’s losing.

“Sentiment,” says John.

These are the conversations you have (you have had, you will have).

You get it wrong, sometimes. 

*******

Sooner or later, one of them is going to say it.

John wants to say it all the time, although the object is never perfectly stable (I love this; I love my life; I love a crime scene in the morning; I love breathing...) He wants to say it all the time, but he doesn’t ,because it’s not like that, though he’d be hard-pressed to say _what_ it’s not like.

Sherlock is weather and chemistry. 

But it’s not like that; it’s not a storm or an exothermic reaction.

It’s not like drowning.

It’s not light, heat, lift, torque, drag, tension, or any other force of nature.

It’s not gravity; it’s not like falling. That can’t be what it’s like, not anymore.

It’s not like saving or being saved (Except that it is.)

*******

There are explosions. There are explosions that don’t happen. There is a Woman who points out that Sherlock believes in a higher power. (Before she drugs and beats him.)

“I love you,” Sherlock mutters.  The light is very low in the bedroom because John has left the door to the passageway open only a crack. He can barely read the elements on the wall.

What?

“Love you,” says Sherlock, muffled, from the bed.

Right. It’s standard, mumbling one’s indefinites and maybes and nots while drugged, dehydrated, mostly asleep.

There might be some doubt at this point, anyway, as to the antecedent. Of the pronoun you.

“John?” Sherlock says.

Well.

*******

John believes in observation more than Sherlock thinks he does.

Pretty early on (but not early enough), John learned that Sherlock has abandonment issues.  That a lot of his behaviours, like those of pack animals (which of course he isn’t) and birds in the family _Anserinae_ (well, maybe) say, “I’m here...where are you?” He doesn’t necessarily want an answer straight away; he just wants to know that he might be answered, that he could be. He wants to be called back to through the fog when he hasn’t even called out yet himself.

He twitches curtains with such grace and subtlety because he’s used to watching people leave.

Jesus, how stupid not to have seen at the very first, that he all he wants is a return, but he doesn’t expect to get one.  Sherlock has unprecedented access to the generally unseen, of course, so to people other than John, of course, his logical conclusions seem unnatural to the point of magic, or, of course, threat.

When John figures it all out, or rather parses the true long-term consequences of it, he has to sit down suddenly because there’s an empty space just behind his knees.

*******

Once, a bomb went off and the windows at 221B imploded and John came running (straight into the blast zone without thinking).

Sherlock looked at him with what was supposed to be nonchalance and wasn’t.

_You came running._

_I did. What of it?_

John has seen the aftermath of too many explosions. That’s why he’d never incite one.

*******

Asked what he believes in John does not say god or a higher power but the virtues: loyalty, steadfastness, service; they may be only human virtues, but they are what they are and he believes in them. (And pressed he’ll allow that he believes in something beyond what his senses can tell him, because sometimes the impossible is true.)

Sherlock’s been told he believes in a higher power (the self? That’s for the philosophers) but he really believes only in the facts, in what can be seen, sensed, observed. (Or so he tells himself.)

At first Sherlock treats nothing at all with reverence. (But later, there’s John Watson’s observable heart.)

At first John treats everything with reverence save himself. (But later there’s reason for that, too.)

*******

There is a Woman. There is a ghost plane. There are explosions that don’t happen.

John’s on his way out the door, sometime after the histrionics of Christmas and the New Year. Sherlock has been alternating rapt silence and talking to (at) him for the past three-and-a-half hours.

“I wish you weren’t going,” Sherlock says, suddenly.

“Oh, you noticed that, did you?”

“What were we talking about?”

“’We’ were talking about your shortcomings.”

 “My _what?_ ”

_Sherlock with that slight flare in his voice, like the emerald flash John saw once at the precise moment of sunset over the dark Atlantic,...it’s as though he’s come alive and present only to me.  The most remarkable presence in the world._

Right. John’s laughter nearly chokes him as he steps back inside and lets the door fall shut behind him.

221B is a whole universe unto itself, a cosmology, the city in miniature and the whole world.

I’d do just about anything, he thinks.

 (Except say it.)

***

It’s difficult, believing in the unseen, but it can be done.

In Afghanistan there were abandoned buildings; there were ghost-children who haunted empty towers and apartment complexes. There were desert voids, wild, rocky places, hostile genii one couldn’t pray to.

There are neglected and abandoned places in London too, secret spaces and passages, places that beauty miraculously finds, and John sees it now, what he never truly saw before, not in his previous life in London, certainly not in the desert. There are spaces in their city, and there are ghosts, of buildings, of people; John has seen them watching, crouching in skips and alleyways, waiting to be discovered, remembered, brought back, redeemed.  And when he walks among them with Sherlock, he feels more alive, more riveted, more present, than he ever has.

They close a circle inside him somehow, and he swears, though he never says, that for Sherlock it’s the same.

People and things are always missing.

There’s a missing boy, a missing wife, a missing jewel, a missing painting. People and things are always missing, and they’re always looking for them. That’s what they do.  They mind the gaps.

And it’s violence, often, that makes them. It’s in the nature of violence to create a void.

Sometimes, of course, it doesn’t happen, but the point is that erasure, elision, disappearance (by bomb, by sniper, by desire, by necessity) could always happen, and it makes one apt to speak one’s mind, to say what one believes.  Or just remark that other people will. 

*******

Sooner or later one of them is going to say it.

_You gave me my second life, my blank slate, and I’ll always owe (wrong verb?) you so much for that._ (No, no, no. Yes... but no.)

_Dim room, drugged, dehydrated, exhausted, won’t remember the next day._ (Nope. Doesn’t count.)

_I don’t really claim to understand that nature of ...this, but it’s the...thing  I’ve ever known and (if I’m honest) that I think I ever will know so whatever that means is all right by me. Is fine. Is good._ (All true. No.)

_It’s unthinkable that anything should happen to you. Do you understand?_ (Better. Better.)

He’d say more, but:

John Watson, doctor, soldier, blogger, favourite linguistic phenomenon: ellipsis.

Sherlock Holmes, consulting genius, the only one in the world, favourite linguistic phenomenon, obviously, recursion _:  The last time I was at a crime scene, oh and by the way John, I adore you; have I told you that; oh and by the way I’d be lost (at a crime scene)without you._

“What have you left out?” Sherlock says to Lestrade. Palming his temples dramatically as though he’s got a migraine.  At their third murder in four days. 

“What did I not see? What have you not told me, Anderson, really, watch the... _what have you not told me_?”

It’s just about twilight. Rain incoming. He holds up an ungloved hand, beckons.

“I need you, John.”

*******

They aren’t soft with one another. 

How can they be when a day (and night) involves hundreds of death-watch beetles, a near-miss with a gravity blade, Lestrade’s  jittery, caffeine-and-patch fuelled rage, four more patches, a substantial pool of vomit, some underwear possibly belonging to Sally Donovan , a test tube full of coagulated type AB-(from whence?), broken glass and an empty fridge at 4 am , mud and blood all over their tiles (scalp wound packed with rust and grit, trail from the doorway to the toilet; where does one red end and another begin?)

Sherlock stops John’s hand, 4:20 am, the edge of their bathtub, 221B Baker Street, Marylebone District, London, England.  Murderer: Put away. Lestrade: Happy.  Sherlock: Bleeding.  John: busy doing one of the things he does best, alive, present. Remember this moment. I love this. I love oxides, mud, blood, broken glass, handcuffs. I love these tiles.

Sherlock stops his hand, looks at him.

“Are you in pain?”

“No,” Sherlock says, reproachful, as though it’s a stupid question; no, as though John’s too good to cause actual pain. He stops John’s hand, holds it still. John knows he’s thinking of something specific, has been reminded of something, doesn’t know what, doesn’t mind what. It’s perfect. Sherlock will sleep soon, the wound closed with perfect dashes.

John’s aware that he’s seen as gentle sometimes and sometimes it shames him, or rather it fills him with pride and shames him simultaneously.  Doctor-soldier is difficult enough to carry around in a war zone; what does one do after that, when one is still both, and neither, and ... something else.

But Sherlock knows he’s dangerous.  He knew that first night, when they saw one another stripped, cased their shuttered, blinkered, symbiotic violence through that bullet-drilled window, framed by the flashing lights of the Met , draped in useless blankets, fuelled by hot-and-sour and oolong.

John tilts his head, squeezes Sherlock’s fingers (all right?), moves his hands back to the edges of the wound. Sherlock will sleep soon; his eyes are already closing. (John might bring him some ice and stay. He might leave and return again and again, because he can, because he wants to, because that’s all Sherlock wants, is for him to come back. To occupy the space he now belongs in.)

Sherlock’s eyes are already closing, and when he finishes, John touches him lightly, with two fingertips, right between them.

*******

John believes that perfect stitches matter, as sorting the aftermath of an IED matters, as putting Sherlock to bed and making sure he’s still breathing matters, as tearing across town into a blast zone matters,and as standing at the ready to go up, to go off, strapped with explosives, matters.  Does it really matter, what we _say_ , or what we don’t?

How explicit should one be about these things? The answer, John knows (has always known, really), is _very._

But that doesn’t change a thing.

Sooner or later, one of them was going to say it. It wasn’t him.

*******

Say (it) now, Ella says to him.

And when he tells her he can’t he means he can’t because he couldn’t before (or no, wouldn’t) and now...

He couldn’t then, and now he won’t.

“Sorry,” he says.

He doesn’t know why he’s apologizing to her. She’s not the one it’s owed to and he’s just given her exactly what she’s asking for, anyway.

(“Love you,” says Sherlock, low, muffled, from the bed.  The light is very low in the bedroom, because John has left the door open only a crack. He can barely read the elements on the wall.)

There’s a murder in Brixton, or in Camden, or in Peckham.  John’s blood is up and his heart’s beating shamefully fast. He’s crouched next to a body and his eyes are adjusting to the light, and where’s Sherlock? He’s somewhere, is Sherlock, suddenly somewhere else, gathering minutiae on the edges of the crime scene, in a skip, on a rooftop, somewhere no-one else will have the sense or the faith to look, halfway across the city, in another London; he’s slipped into those spaces in-between, the ones only he seems to know about—and yet he’s still here, as if he didn’t go, and as if it will ever cease to matter where he is.

Someday, one of them is going to say it. Or one of them has said it.  They said it (are saying it) all the time, with dots and dashes of their own devising.

Mind the gap, John thinks, nonsensically.  Ella’s windows. Broken glass. Blood on their tiles.  It’s raining.  He’ll say it.  But not to a substitute.  Not to a grave.

When the circle closes again, he’ll say it, when he stops twitching incessantly, inexpertly, at the curtains, waiting.

(What if you were to say you believed in it?)

It’s in the nature of violence to create a void. But he’ll say it; he’ll find a way.

(I believe in Sherlock Holmes.)

When there’s another body for them to crouch over in the rain, when their heads are together again, close and warm over the cool breath of the dead, it’ll happen; it’ll happen then, he’ll say it then, belatedly, perfectly, in the beautiful twilight of omission.

**Author's Note:**

> "Then why do you care about people at all?' she asked, `if you don't believe in love? Why do you bother about humanity?'  
> `Why do I? Because I can't get away from it.'  
> `Because you love it,' she persisted.  
> It irritated him.  
> `If I do love it,' he said, `it is my disease.'  
> `But it is a disease you don't want to be cured of,' she said, with some cold sneering.  
> He was silent now, feeling she wanted to insult him.  
> `And if you don't believe in love, what do you believe in?' she asked mocking. `Simply in the end of the world, and grass?'  
> He was beginning to feel a fool.  
> `I believe in the unseen hosts,' he said." –D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love


End file.
